It's somewhat less depressing than that, from a personal point of view, at least. Most interventions carry with them pretty significant risk. Therefore the choice is not between "do nothing and see what happens, or do something with zero risk and see if it helps", but rather "do nothing and see what happens, or do something really high risk and see if it does more harm than good."
Iatrogenic disease (harm caused by interventions) is by some measures the leading cause of death in the US, outstripping heart disease and standing at more than ten times the rate of death by automobile.
Under those circumstances, not doing anything until something horrible happens is not a bad policy, and the people engaged in it are not expressing cynical indifference so much as a due awareness of the real risks involved in almost any intervention.
Which is, admittedly, kind of depressing, but for quite different reasons. Either way, technology and patient empowerment are likely to help.
http://www.avaresearch.com/ava-main-website/files/2010040106... puts it on #3, after heart disease and cancer. So, it may be an exaggeration, but not a huge one and certainly not an inexcusable one. It is fairly common to remember that something is way more common (or way rarer) than one would think, and then overestimate the number when trying to produce it later.
Even if true, I don't know what to make of such a statement - needless interventions for ALL diseases/causes may kill a lot more than any ONE single, narrowly defined disease/cause - that says more about the classification/definition system than interventions... it's only if interventions on any ONE disease kill a significant proportion vs the disease itself that that intervention / interventions are truly dangerous...
The problem is that it's not just "needless interventions" that can backfire. Even in situations where an intervention could unquestionably help, there's still plenty of ways for it to go wrong. The most obvious is human error -- a well-intentioned intervention that's disastrously mis-executed -- but that's just the beginning of the list, not the end.
What you have to remember is that for the vast majority of human history, medical interventions of all kinds were at least as likely to hurt the patient as they were to help them, because of our crude understanding of how the body works and how disease is communicated.
A textbook example is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s classic 1843 study of puerperal fever (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes,_Sr.#Medi...). It showed how doctors who were doing a completely routine intervention -- general examinations of the health of newborn babies -- were actually picking up that infection from babies who had it and then spreading it to others who did not, because they didn't sterilize their instruments and change their clothing between examinations.
This seems obvious to us today, but at the time it was quite shocking, because in thousands of years of medicine doctors had never sterilized their instruments or clothing when moving from one patient to another. It never occurred to them, because none of the prevailing theories of how diseases spread called for it. So untold numbers of newborns sickened and died because of well-meaning, completely uncontroversial interventions by their doctors.
Today doctors obviously do understand the role of germs in spreading disease better, and they have much improved medical technologies and practices available to them, which has helped reduce the risks of those types of interventions. But millennia of these types of unpleasant discoveries has given medicine as a profession a healthy regard for the possibility that what they think they know even today could be incomplete or flat-out wrong.
> Today doctors obviously do understand the role of germs in spreading disease better
And yet study after study of hospital acquired infections show that simple hand washing between patient examinations is abysmally irregular (between 10 and 50%.)
Iatrogenic disease (harm caused by interventions) is by some measures the leading cause of death in the US, outstripping heart disease and standing at more than ten times the rate of death by automobile.
Under those circumstances, not doing anything until something horrible happens is not a bad policy, and the people engaged in it are not expressing cynical indifference so much as a due awareness of the real risks involved in almost any intervention.
Which is, admittedly, kind of depressing, but for quite different reasons. Either way, technology and patient empowerment are likely to help.